La maison vers le lac
The House Toward the Lake
Joseph Melon
The long years, the long months, oh the long weeks! How the happy days are distant barks That our memory perceives less and less And which, upon the past, are nothing more than points. Oh! dilapidated present that the storm shakes! One waits, head bowed, feet in the mud, For the miraculous bread that a better tomorrow, With clement words, would place in our hand. In a clutter of palaces and hovels, Of houses of commerce and temples without foundations, Man roams without glory and infamous care Settles snickering beneath his darkened skull, And the crowd that dies, stupefied with toil, Raises a cursing fist at the rock of Prometheus.
Follow me then, I know an old magician Who plunges into the All and brings back nothing, Save singing words that summon dreams And sow the poppy beneath canopies of lies: It is at the hour when the moon through the window Spreads a supple carpet upon the desk of labor, And with a friendly glance that invites and haunts me, Accompanies me to the table where his step precedes mine. The lovely crystal globe that no thread holds Rolls, silently, upon the ether that supports it; It is blue toward the moon, and toward the sun, pink, But its double color one opposes the other; It rises, then descends, like a Cartesian diver, Under the invisible hand that presses upon it. It is doubtless a toy of force and balance Built by the care of a god learned and free, Or perhaps it is a word that the Divinity Has sealed forever in its sphericity. What does it matter! Whether it be word or mechanism, Come, lull your pain before this singular spectacle!
The Church
A being of uncertain fate, the child leaves the church, The mystery of love made him shed tears; He leaves and sees open the gate of sorrows, The gate of life, at the porch of the church. He turns once more: within, the incense, the flowers, The artificial atmosphere where his soul was caught, Before him, the brutal sun, a precise flame, Lights the real, the world of ardors.
Why not remain in the cool of the mystical Shadow, in the mysterious evening where sinks The mad desire to live and to be strong? Upon the untroubled lake of first beliefs A vessel heavy with gold, with fires and prayers Conducts you slowly to the shores of death!
One Must First Grow
One must first grow; it is a long time passing To build a body, to create senses Which we shall use to burn incense To some foolish god, clumsy and lewd. One wastes one’s best years dreaming of the race, Of the Fatherland! one lives in a mad contradiction, One builds futures without tasting the present, The emptier morrow clasps the eve.
How brief then is life and paltry is fate, And how near the evening of a day is to its morning; How imperceptibly the hourglass runs out! Before Wisdom, Death enters despite the noise; The palace I reckoned appears a closet, Nothing left between the walls, all slips, all crumbles!
Jacob’s Ladder
O shelter for a moment beneath frail breasts The clear-obscure dream that the dead have dreamed, And the anonymous flesh to the unfinished work Brings with faith the love in which you persist.
Beneath the clay of a body taken from clay One feels a fire running, caught from neighboring tombs; Man is the will-o’-the-wisp trembling without roots Who returns to the ground from which he rose.
Jacob’s ladder where the spirit ascends Is at each rung the star one abandons; Each of our tombs opens a new path. The evenings of love, the evenings of blood, the evenings of struggle Are bugles of ardor for the angel and the brute, Forging in blood a mutual destiny.
I Want a Mask
I am very weary of the indifferent, sad mask That destiny put on me to walk the course; Neither poet nor madman, I am the extra That a stupid tenor pushes to the last row. I pretend to scorn his song and his gesture, His childish laurels, his gold that I detest, But my walled-in heart, silenced by fear, Like a dark ghetto sees dark in its virtue. My vain dignity from the depths of the wings Very incompletely separates itself and meddles In the triumphant drama that Passion makes: Through the banal concourse of desire and fact! Too often in tears I lift the curtain To commend myself to the splendors of the star, While upon the stage, before me, strong arms Strangle desires or topple the mighty! The orchestra surges with rut and fanfare, It is a mad stallion that rears and startles, And the bells lost in the heavy, warm woods Are the maddening call of blood and knives. Meanwhile I shut myself in a sad chamber Where a poppy dies perfuming itself with amber, And there, my sad eyes in the pond of a mirror Grow sad at my brow, calm as a manor In the gold of a summer evening, in the smooth lawns, In the security of jealous enclosures. Ah! Ah! to follow the resounding steps of those Who are shod at night in happy buskins! To don a giant mask of an ancient comedian, To put upon my cold body the anonymous tunic That the debaucher takes like a thief in the night And leaves in tatters for Remorse as it flees! To don a giant mask where the mouth widens Beneath the tearing of its savage laughter, The ancient mask, heavy, that weeps and laughs Upon the conscious brutality of the mind! In my empty, clear heart, alas! no more swallows, No more moving reflections, no more images, no more wings!
The Cigars
O soil! in striking you my steps are very joyful To feel that you serve as immense sarcophagus! You satisfy my heart with a desire for vengeance That dwells in it sometimes when I am far from the skies!
You enclose them then, those madmen, those proud ones Who passed laughing in their vain insolence And whose chariots dragging their useless opulence Scraped your fair flanks with their muddy furrows: Those who had built themselves elegant dwellings In order to distract themselves there by profaning the hours, Those who, so as not to see the wretched weep, To their palaces trembling with the tumult of feasts Put up thick curtains and discreet windowpanes. You enclose them all — and I feel joyful!
The Toad
On the borders of a field where no cattle graze A minuscule marsh, on the margin of the road, Conceals from the passerby, with a rampart of reeds, The stagnant and unhealthy aspects of its waters.
No noise, no song when the road is white With the noonday sun that slowly bends Upon the hillsides burned by its too ardent step And descends in the ether the tiers of the west! Beneath the water lilies heavy with flies and fragrances And beneath the blossoms that hollow themselves into domes, Beneath its coating fresh with verdigris, The marsh rocks, lulls a thousand drowsy eyes. Insects crouching beneath the unrippled water Suspend the labor of their avid search, Sleep safely in the cradle of thread They weave around themselves like a subtle shelter; All along the reeds, bronze-gleaming flies Parade the jewels of their iridescent wings, Pausing a moment when sometimes a toad Comes to breathe and shows a bit of ugly skin;
All sleeps, and yet all lives and all ferments Beneath these humidities that the sun magnetizes Despite the hostility of shadow and coolness Toward an emergence of form and color! But the sun is dying, it bleeds in space, Bloodying the lakes that conceal its trace, Leaves on the burning bushes its scarf in tatters And in the Oceans puts its glory to the tomb; The horizon has paled, the dome deepens, Its vault widens over the fearful plain, But soon some come to sound the horn Beneath the rising stars and the golden moon! Now the marsh awakens at the evening that delivers it, It tunes its voice. The moon too gives life, And its pallid ray in the office of the nights Makes the matrix and the well tremble in the depths. The sweet summer wind that prowls through the plains And troubles with a cool foot the calm of the fountains, At the edge of the marsh pauses a single instant, Marvels at the moon in this stagnant mirror, Amuses itself by mingling, blowing upon their webs, The coal-black insects with the little stars, And makes cross in their swaying The shapes of the mire with the eyes of the firmament! Meanwhile in the mud where its belly reposes, The monstrous and sad toad has taken the pose Of a grotesque singer, a humiliated bard In a carnal dungeon bound by ugliness.
Upon the viscous slime it stretches with fear, A vibrating catapult it hurls the plaint Of eternal exile in animality: Toward the ramparts of ether of divinity.
There are powerful bodies and happy forms That displace the azure. The eagles on the rock set their hollow talons, The finches on the wall. Light and strong steps and swift wings, For prey, for pleasure, Carry their ardors in atrocious combats Toward the goal to seize. The hardened ground responds, resounds and rings; The mobile heel Takes back from it by its spring the force it gives And flees to the horizon. The child runs playing, the man acts and hastens Toward the woman or the friend; Distant rendezvous unite the joy Of north and south; They tread singing the long ribbon of roads Twisted through the green fields; They go thus bearing their credos and their doubts To diverse climes. There are those who at night, seeking solitude In pairs, with a single step, Come very slowly under the solicitude Of what they do not see, Trees in the fields, stars in the cloud, The sweet singing toad. They do not know this evening the fatal advent Of the destructive moment. A mutual love lulls and rocks them, And they are ants Who rebuild palaces for the tooth of the harrow And the enemy plowshares. How touching is their dream! How sweet their songs! They are beautiful, for deceived By the peaceful illusions of the mosses In the thick copses, They will never see that their beauty provokes The hatching of worms. Beneath their slow steps, the death their love revokes Prepares its deserts. Farewell the fair lover! enough the fair beloved! That was only a loan. Surrender your breasts, your eyes, nothing more lies, Nothing more speaks true! They will separate you, then all will be empty! Each alone in the cell! O breasts, breasts of my nights, fruits beneath my avid lip, Warm moving belly! O my precise and mystical felicities Full of eternity. O twin ardors, spasms become a canticle, Have you even been!
The dead are never in the tomb or the urn, Pious child, but mad, Your father, this morning, is dead, take his buskin, Strike the ground without fear! Like a vibrant swarm the blithe valiancies Issue from memory; Hear his deeds proclaim their resistance, And his horse whinny. Behold the arsenal; can they be spoils, These resolutions, These glories that the rust of bitter passions Never eroded. Now, there are bows as there are breastplates; His will alone Bent them in the fire taken from tenacious desires Of his virility.
Your father left neither corpse nor ash: He left blood! Vermilion warm blood that you can hear In its powerful channels. Moving, living tomb, you carry your ancestors! There are those who have vanished, But there are no dead in beechwood coffins! The dead have increased, The dead live in you; break the spells Of the urn and the vault, Save their hard efforts, their virtues and their vices, Raise the torch! The derisory hurricane demolished the tent, But carried nothing away, Be the new warrior who endures and takes root, Escorted by his son; Upon wise designs or the loins of chimeras, Ride the horizon; Impose your armor upon the gaze of mysteries, They will be reflected there. Follow the golden cloud! or beat iron at the forges, Act for yourself, by yourself! With manifold spoils you must overflow, Being your own law! But do not fear to love the tenderness and the moon, The toad’s plaint! Nor the sound of the bell expiring in the dusk Above the hamlet!
Monk
A bit of grass one sees through the black grille That the bars of a sad cell form, An interesting flight of some dragonfly That vanishes, then, alone, leaves you with the evening! A solitary cypress, a white wall that recedes By twenty steps only the vain enclosure of the will, That is the chosen horizon of the heart in despair That life has cloistered as in an ergastulum! But the task is sweet, and simple, to dig Each morning the grave where one must lay The body so tortured by the hairshirt of the soul.
Soul, they will enclose like a seed this body In the soil prepared by the office of the dead, And you will depart alone to the star that acclaims you!
Mystical Dream
Why sow flowers on a profane courtyard? The crossroad wind, the wicked wind that flees, Will wither on their breast your midnight tears. Why sow flowers on a profane courtyard? Listen: in the mysterious evening fields The dreaming soul goes through the fruitful moors Seeking for its altars mystical garlands And the subtle perfumes the censer demands. Contemplation encloses it in its domain; A very distant, very soft song, a vague echo brings back A canticle heard in a dreamed temple. By the adorable ecstasy where the pure Spirit isolates itself, No more form, no more color, no more speech! O canticle heard in a dreamed temple!
Presentiment
Each morning — God, may I be wrong! — The dying sounds in the woods of a horn; It is not a salute to the victorious day That has just felled the shadows beneath the skies, And it is not the call, even infinitely sad, Of a shepherd, to the fatherland where happiness exists!
I am afraid to express what I have sensed, My terrified heart feels it is warned. Oh! how often then I run to my window To see the archangel or the mercenary pass, The matinal bell-ringer, the terrified herald Who proclaims to me a fate that had haunted me. I have never seen him, but I hear his dying Plaint, growing tragic and so doleful With the echo from the rock from which a crow flees In the fright of my heart where a tomb rises!
Vigny
Vigny, noble inhabitant of the interstellar fields, Speaks the sacred drama of solitary souls; He lights the ardent wax of his heart, Then his wing rejoins an angelic choir That unrolls in the air its procession of glory Toward the gilded ramparts of the ivory city. One no longer remembers there that anything began, The mystical present has had no past, Henceforth no more remorse, no more of those dreadful dreams Where one sees all the old lies return. One no longer remembers, not even the summers, Nor the vain harvests of other felicities, One hears, when God silences His eternal voices, The palpitation of palms and wings. The definitive instant is no more than eternity; Forms are essence, immutability. The word is sealed by seals of light Beneath brows that never need prayer.
But how much sacred languor a terrestrial night possesses, And with how many living fires its crown is decked; How it drowses, tender beneath the terror Of the uncertain awakening of heart against heart; Life, at the divine port, returns when evening falls, And the star in the dark sky watches over its dove; It moans with hope in the departing wind That carries to infinity the love it dreamed, While the rock, the valley and the dune Absorb the fresh and sad soul of the moon!
Waiting
We go with slow steps toward an uncertain evening. — The path soon broken, like a thread that snaps, Will show us no more the road one travels And Death with her dry fingers will take us by the hand.
We shall go slowly, without jolt or shock, Toward the touching gold of a fair day without regrets; Our eyes will carry all the grave reflections Of our illusion that was always so sweet. Our soul strolls at the bottom of a dark garden. — Let us dream still — do you think it is yet distant, That ineffable evening that no dawn awakens? It may be that already, from the heights of cold ether, An invisible ship descends to the narrow world, And that already, Death steers toward our brows.
Defeats
How sad it is to be an untiring heart, A vagabond of love on uncertain roads, Naive and tender child who, ceaselessly listening, Follows untiringly a worse mocking spirit!
Beings are for him poignant defeats, Not one proclaims him victor for a single instant, Not one is fruitful through his divine ardor, — His sheaf is scattered to winds, to cold, to doubt. O my brother! O my sister, I see summer skies, Will you with me savor the purity Of an aromatic evening deep in the valley?
My tears, too heavy, too warm, are mystical fruits From a delicious breast that would nourish your nights! Why then scorn my desolate soul!
Untitled Sonnet
So here I am again; I dream and mope. My days spit blood upon so many dead leaves! It is the wind of misfortune that shut these doors Where the hearth dies beneath calm ceilings. Of an opulent mind I have emptied the depths; My unchained griefs, my sorrows in cohorts Have annihilated all the strongest harvests, And my wounded remorse bleeds in the shallows. Yet I dreamed of building examples Of love and beauty, as one builds temples On bases of marble and beneath designs of azure! My heart swells like a lateen sail, And if Death carries me to the neighboring star, I shall live without loving to be happy and pure!
The Swans
The swans have passed from one bank to the other While my heart was going adrift, And the oars seemed two wings that never Will rise again in flights toward the heights,
And in the lake, a mirror framed with autumn gold, I watched the past glide by, astonished At having lasted long, at being still, not knowing The origin of the days that lead it to evening!
I have left the paths that go to the dwellings, I have lost the trail where the hours circulate, I have wearied cares upon my resolute steps And those who followed me will see me no more. Now come bleed in the deserted chambers, Loyal heart, ardent heart — and number your losses; A Christ divinely welcomes you and smiles, His delicate hands will swaddle your spirit, — He will anoint your brow and your humble meninges With his humility, fresher than linen!
In the very deep well of my renunciations The adorable reflection of your celestial rays Infiltrates and transfigures in enchantments The infinitely small of my modest virtues. You have looked upon the clay in which I am enclosed, You have entered the chamber where I adore, And my heart beneath its roof built of mud and bone Vibrates like a bell in its sonorous cage.
The Strange Passerby
to the sculptor Fix-Masseau.
This hard passerby whom you have covered With the disdainful rag that curses and renounces, Seeks through the contempt where his gaze sinks The Eden he has not seen, but has discovered. His sure foot was always insensible to the thorn, His brow like a rock bears the marks of winters, His wrinkles have frightened the perverse crossroads, And his mitre, at the star, is a fire that announces him.
The harsh imperator has cried toward exile, And, clutching his bow like a subtle scepter, He dreams of lions grown old at the altitudes. Let us follow him step by step, feet and brows bare, without noise, For sometimes he stops, he looks at the night, And makes his heart weep in the depths of solitudes.
The Mad Wind
I have already made the round of possibilities And worn the avenues of vague destinies; — The fresh fingers of the mad wind also in the clouds Draw their derisive design full of strangeness!
I have met no magi, no unknown women, Nor religious men drunk with austerities, The pebbles of the path were numbered, All the passions were already known! The interest then is only in the eternal decor, Sometimes motionless like a golden idol And sometimes fluid like the water of its rivers! Now, I understand nothing of the world I see, I hear nothing either of its intimate voice, But its sharp distress is dear to widowed souls!
Fairground Sadness
It is the guttural, male voice of the singers That poisons me so with unspeakable languors, And makes me dream of dissolute hours Where my soul is so far from resolute forces. A cajoling feast awaits the violins That make my resolutions vanish. An endless waltz, ardent and popular, With the very weary rhythm of a poor consumptive, Turns in the too-warm air of a poor crossroads, Beneath a summer night very long for love. Oh, to give back this blood too heavy in my veins, In the very slow death of what was my pains; To find again through joy and the unconscious That ingenuousness of the fresh and amiable heart! O to rid myself of acquired formulas, Of the burden of knowledge, and of learned virtues! To vibrate! but only beneath the force of the wind, And not like a lute that is often tormented!
One must go weep at the feet of a stranger, A young one in body, the first to come along, And catch oneself in the magical net of pleasure Where the dove desire palpitates, bleeding! The race has prepared for love, slaves, Dark ones especially — with lips, with grave eyes!
Empty Sky
Was the past not, for those who have passed, Better than the present for one who still sighs And walks without a god beneath his weary feet Making the grass grow that soothes and adorns? A sky always open before the flights of the soul Has always pushed back to infinity The lying oasis that a vain dream demands, The glorious palace from which one believes oneself banished.
Gazes widened beneath the fair marble brows Have summoned Apparitions in the night, But the whispering of the wind around the tree Still tells its lie to the generations. All have been deceived, and each and every one, Having with life inherited vain hope, Goes, on benign evenings, to offer to the moon A heart full of ideal, of feeling, of sweet leaven.
One brings to Moloch tender consciences, Fruits of pure happiness ripened in Corfus, The white breads of the mind, the cakes of knowledge, And the honey dreams of the wise and the mad. Then too, all along the Roman terraces, Before the austere discipline of the cypresses, It is Cato, it is Brutus whose human virtues Would teach gods energetic secrets. These are great designs, efforts without armor That offer themselves nobly to the lances of fate; The crash of their fall will teach the race, It is a trampled torch that never goes out.
And then, and then, these are tears and canticles, The tendernesses of the just and the small, The modest cloaks and the modest veils, The remorse of the ascetic ashamed of an appetite.
For whom then so many flowers upon the ivory courts, For whom then the virtues that your heart has bound In a sheaf, where sweetness serves as bond to glory, Antigone speak, and you Cordelia!
Your beneficent hands that a miracle seconds Have guided the old man to the mysterious threshold Of a domain that opens where the world closes, And thanks to you, evil has become the better.
Do you believe that ever these arches and these porticos, These temples with steps veined with our blood, These paths carpeted with our white tunics, Will see pass a god more just than powerful? The altars are adorned beneath empty firmaments, The sacrifice is ready for one who will not come; In vain upon the hard ground avid ears Bend, hoping for the heaviness of his step.
Keep these monuments for your apotheosis, O mortals obstinate in your noble efforts; Upon the godless pediments let the hero rest, And consecrate the temple to the shades of your dead!
The Last Evenings
One must no longer sing love songs at evening. — Cast into the angry waves your vain mandolin And its indolent rhythm that a vain desire commands, One must no longer sing love songs at evening.
The weary world toward nothingness inclines. The frightened watchman will fall from his tower, And perhaps tomorrow, at the hour when day is born, The last morning will descend the hill. Already I have seen at evening spirits, two by two, Brush our houses with their luminous feet! Repeat pious songs upon an austere string. To await the instant so troubled but near, One must sing, at night, without hope of morning, A long canticle where the soul accords with the pure spirit!
Nocturne
The night has delivered me from your ungrateful speeches And takes me back from the day that twisted my arms; I leave the tools, the hammers and the anvil, I smile at him who brings me the pen; I illuminate the room where I am visited By the old vagabond of old summer nights.
It is a heart of old that a miracle preserves, He has roamed everywhere, he must serve still; In this evening’s star he recognizes the one That for ten thousand years, upon the shepherds, has shone; In this evening’s man who marvels at a lure He also recognizes the old Adam who weeps, And his thin finger from which all rings slip, In the sleeping ether, makes ancient signals. He knows what love is and what the moon is worth To guide the mortal in search of fortune, It is he who, through the ages, carries hope, a gift That the wicked centuries bid the present hold, He who, on summer nights, draws the fireworks Upon the pompous nothings built into edifices! Vagabond, you will come, I have no fear of you, And my nocturnal song will attest my faith. What does it matter what was, the dead days, the mummies? Beneath the moon, in the garden, the flowers are sleeping; In each radicle and in each branch A demon breathes life with a reed, And with a diligent arm wearied by its task Spreads around us wineskins of oxygen; The earth is potent and the awakenings are ready. I am willing to listen to the wind in the cypresses!
Romanticism
It is a great park lost in a circus of woods That isolates and frames it like a rare painting. The round moon shines; a doe takes fright, The silence is troubled by a double voice. A woman on the castle balcony separates From the lover who repeats their supreme emotions; He leaves her bare arms for the first time, And divine love adorns and decks them.
The wind, very sadly, in the cypress woods, Modulates the song of eternal regrets; But they do not hear the soft voice that weeps. Their united brows, very white, toward a future temple, Stretch anxiously toward the calls of the azure, In the uncertain star they seek their dwelling!
Extinguished Lamps
O days fled in vanished years Without a song from my heart modulating the intoxication Of living, nor the ardor where our love hastens, Nor the noble combats of thinkers never believed! Days thus fallen are but dead leaves; They cover the ground with their solemnity, Melancholy humus added each evening, Which rises, imprisoning the black hinges of our doors! Days thus passed are upon a mirror Only the exhausted breath of a child near the tomb, The image upon the pond, when in winter night falls, Of a solitary bird rising in the dark! Days thus passed are extinguished lamps Upon the map of the world and the map of the heavens, They are lost cries in anxious calls In the lost desert of snows without footprints.
Of all that passed nothing has remained alive; My mind has nourished useless hours, Upon the ocean of days I have fixed no islands, I have fretted upon shifting sand. Nights have radiated without being still As beautiful as the moment when I savored them, They too are dead, the Aprils and the Mays, Without a ray of mind having fixed their dawn.
Why did I not speak all the enchantments, The incantations that things murmured To the ecstatic heart of the most minor causes Under the suggestion of their radiance!
Alas! dead too the perfumes of the sublime And the secret gardens of my scrupulous heart, Dead the heavy suns and the bushes in flame That always lit upon the highest peak!
Bleed, my cowardices, and mount upon the cross: Let it be a gibbet for your craven phantoms, For your renunciations of the noblest tasks, For your desertions of duties and of rights!
I have watched pass as in a lethargy The pompous spectacle of the august universe, And not a gesture, a cry, not the humblest verse, Has sprung from my heart to burn incense to life!
O day! superb gifts, O nights, discreet jewels, Waves that flow like poets’ tears, Clear and fruitful, distant golds of so many retreats, Bursts of so many flowers, of roses and of holly; And you, enchanted hearts who walk the moor, Perfuming the ground with a fair dream — and blood, Forgive! — tears of fire burn me as they slip, Remorse has woven for me its poignant garland! Forgive! the day wanes; my eyes are weary From having searched above for the gesture that pardons; I can see the Fatherland where your soul harvests, But to cross the bank, where then shall be the fords?
The Tower
The tower is white at the edge of the infinite waves, Then a desert still separates it from the desert; Of the fleets of the ether it seems the lighthouse, Beside it the lakes are tarnished mirrors. Without a door it is shut, it has the splendor that separates; The birds dare not hang their nests there, At sea the sailors feel themselves exiled, They weep, and their heart strays back to childhood.
White tower, I shall die, my destinies are known, And your ivory steps will await my bare feet! Now I have no son: to whom shall I leave you? Divine habitation, from which I often saw God, May you, on Christmas night — not before! — Lie down solitary in a shroud of snow!
The Divine Night-Light
What bow will translate the royalty of hearts, Of ardent hearts, of hearts warmer than the breasts! They are the pure mirrors of divine figures, And beneath the flesh of a day they wear out their ardors! Who then will be able to sing the lily on the hills, The summer evening, the azure, the mystical languors? What bow will translate the royalty of hearts, Of ardent hearts, of hearts warmer than the breasts! The ivory and gold tower that the forest shelters Is lit by the fires of a pure discreet hearth; The heart, the divine heart, very gently lights. The tragic song of the capricious wind Dies; — who then will sing? — all the gazes of the heavens Lean over the ardent heart that consumes itself!
The Shutters
Let us carefully close the heavy wooden shutters! Night comes: it is sad; and in the shadow it lights The nearly obscure beacons that tower over the mist From the edge of distant capes of infinities too cold. Let us leave the night outside the human window, Let us go no more to contemplate its clear hard gazes, They bring to the heart their painful perhaps And the strange reflection of future problems. Your lamp measures you a circular hearth That guards your mind with a tutelary halo. Close the shutters well: avid sphinx, the night Prowls, sings, sighs: fall asleep, it is midnight. Sleep descends you into your magical tomb, Sleep; the lamp dies, the fire dies, the snow falls, But time, which in your home has become familiar, Strikes with a golden hammer upon the pendulum! And if one sees life one sees it in prints, Under the circular protection of the lamps!
Ills, Words
We shall stroll beneath the moons of summers; We shall speak of love and of theology In order to illuminate with a flash of magic Our destiny that crawls in the depths of blindness. We shall escape the body, the corruption, We shall break the bones and the necessities, And as Samson did, beneath our angered brows The Spirit will bring down the house it disowns. For we will no longer be so little, so brief; Our soul will build gigantic naves Where strong Destinies will process. The lexicons are full of words… Hurry, Death already carries off tiles from your roof, And your threshold is cracked by the foot of the years!
On the Subject of “Dorian Gray”
The Byzantine trouble that Ambiguity exhales Makes Lohengrin dream in the gardens of evening, A double perfume rises from the single censer, But none can name the form it invokes! The nuptial palace that only a dream can see Stirs very gently with a mutual colloquy; A double sigh rises from a single heart that evokes it, And the forsaken bed was but a resting place. We shall no longer worship as barbarians do: Two voiceless idols in two niggardly forms: Our beauty will be the archangel of pure sex. — The earth evolved as numbers ordain, But the Byzantine incense smokes upon its ruins, And Plato, in ecstasy, awaits the Man to come!
Venite, Adoremus
The aging archangels wandered at the water’s edge; They conversed among themselves about the young sailors, About the widows who go to see the sea from the end of streets, About the fleets that will be things vanished!
The vast sky mirrors itself in the great tin mirror, And each smiles there at the Return so certain That will come again bearing fruits and abundance And will be invited for eight evenings, to the dances. But longer still one would go to listen to The marvelous tales one would like to doubt. The sailor has seen the figure of the globe In its precise contours that the ocean encompasses, Whether the naked sun, on the African soil, Rained its golden shafts on faces of bronze, Or whether, beneath its net of pale silver, the moon Made the west dream of love and lagoon. The sailor too, in foreign eyes, Has seen the flash of rut and danger pass, And on orgy evenings in distant Bosphoruses, He has seen monstrous phosphors ignite! But when he returns, the Madonna and Jesus Will breathe upon his brow the forgetting of such excesses, And the evening when, from the body, the dove takes flight, They will accompany him to his modest tomb… The aging archangels sang at the water’s edge, But it was a canticle and not at all sobs. Men have come as on a pilgrimage With instruments of probe and of weighing, But before departing, before giving themselves to the winds, They had consulted their learned oracles, And their solid vessels, simple and unadorned, Rode at their ease upon the backs of tides. They did not go to fish, as sailors do, The supple inhabitants of the saline depths; Refusing to capture in avid nets The fish more numerous than the sea has wrinkles, They sometimes drew up at the end of their long threads Humble lineaments that walk on cilia, And contemplated life in the depths of infusoria, As a priest, trembling, approaches the ciboria! In the ancient cradle, it is no longer a giant Who would be sleeping, rocked by the ocean, And who, upon waking, with a magnanimous voice, Would proclaim the word that animates the universe. In the immense palace with vaults of coral, A thaumaturgic god, a dwarf god at work Vegetates blindly at the bottom of a cell; It floats to swim, and to walk retreats, It must be segmented to cut short its coma, It is the father of all, the God Protoplasm! Now, thanks to the reagent that alone develops it, Let us examine the god of gods, under the microscope! But who then will lay, at the goal of our aspirations, Laurels forever green upon our brows forever white! The aging archangels waited, in ecstasy; In the silent infinite the finite overflows. We have, singing, accompanied Faith, And borne without faltering love with the law; We have smothered our instincts beneath the ash, And we have grown old without letting ourselves be caught By the tender speeches of the young cajoling spirit That brushed our flesh beneath our linen veils. The wax of the candles saved us from doubt, A chasm that reason has dug drop by drop; And our psalms drowned out the trumpets of Pride Whose red tunic encloses a heart in mourning! In the final nights, we place night-lights By the hospital beds and the frightened rooms; We help the dying man cross the courtyard, And do not leave him until Jesus hastens!
We serve, we shall serve Faith queen of the world, So beautiful, and yet so strong, that she prunes The poisoned plants, the bitter grasses That the suicide chews going to hell; In the shadow, her long feet appear as doves That could fly away, but remain at the tombs, In order to accompany the fresh despairs That prowl with slow steps beneath the cloak of evenings; Her eyes are altars from which all light comes, And her breast is a dome where a prayer floats!
The aging archangels waited, in ecstasy; In the silent infinite, the finite overflows.